


Wild Hunt

by Feinstaubpartikel



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Nightmares, Past Abuse, Past Relationship(s), death mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-08
Updated: 2018-08-08
Packaged: 2019-06-24 00:25:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15618369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feinstaubpartikel/pseuds/Feinstaubpartikel
Summary: A rogue trader grapples with nightmares, regrets (general) and the death of her immediate family.





	Wild Hunt

\- I -

 

It always starts inconspicuously enough: She turns to her side, feels the fabric of the blanket slide over her legs and waves the lights off, her thoughts still tangled around the last report she read, the readouts from her terminals on the bridge or the figures she still has to finish calculating.

 

Mostly she just exhales and closes her eyes, curls into herself and tries to into the push the day-cycle from her mind. Every so often, she turns back onto her back and stares into the darkness above her for a while, numbers and letters tumbling over themselves in her head, or tries to bury her face into her pillows, the loose mass of her hair catching between her collarbone and the fabric beneath. It’s only rarely that she bounces to her feet as soon as the darkness engulfs her (the glow-globes flaring to life again) and blindly stumbles over to the dresser, fumbling for training clothes, her heart already racing.

 

No, it usually starts inconspicuously enough.

 

Her thoughts jumble sooner or later, and her mind turns from her work to – something else. Memories rise to the surface: of her old tutors, her teachers, of her father writing correspondence in one of the antechambers (the skin of his hands even lighter than the parchment), of her grandmother wandering along the shelves of her librarium aboard the _Martyred Saint_ , of her mother behind her desk (dark skin against darker wood), of her brothers’ heads bent over paper and ink.

 

Inevitably, the memories of _them_ turn into memories of _then,_ which are only a letter apart and infinitely worse.

 

And still – the start is always too subtle (or familiar) enough for her to notice.

 

She remembers steel on steel (one of the duels fought over slights to her family’s name), blood on skin (one of the fights she picked to distract bullies and rivals from her brothers), fingers curling into fabric (yanking them back into safety) or the dull sound of bodies hitting the floor (one of them falling during self-defence training).

 

And then, suddenly:

 

_I should have been there._

 

It only goes downhill from there. She tries to reason with herself sometimes, but no matter how she attempts to make her case – she always loses.

 

_Had I been there, I would have ended up dead or missing too._

 

_But maybe – I’ve always been better when it came to self-defence…_

_Not that mother was a worse duellist than I was._

_But I’m not just a good duellist. I’m a good fighter – that’s not the same._

_I wouldn’t have frozen up._

 

_They probably didn’t even have weapons close by, at least not Eo and Luc._

_If I just – it was always up to me!_

_Of course they couldn’t- I should have been there._

_I shouldn’t have let them pawn me off to Barroya like that; if I’d insisted on staying…_

The nights where she finally bolts to her feet, shocks her body wide awake with a freezing shower and wanders off to find somebody to fence with are the better ones: Those only leave her tired and tend to cause headaches that seem to try and split her head open like an over-ripe fruit.

 

The nights where she doesn’t find a way out, where her thoughts tangle and tangle into knots that stay with her for days and continue tangling like growing tumours, where she finally drifts off to sleep without coming to rest – those nights are a lot worse.

 

 

\- II -

 

After maybe three or four weeks after - after all _that_ , she finally realizes the difference between the bad and the worse nightmares: The bad ones are the ones that jolt her awake during the early hours of the morning, but that are difficult to recall even then. The worse ones are the ones she remembers.

 

 

\- III -

 

_The corridor leading up to her rooms is not quite deserted – the guards are standing next to the double door as always – but something about the scene presenting itself to her feels… lonely, almost._

_The floor is cold beneath her bare feet._

_The familiar paintings are hanging on the walls as they always do: the two landscapes, the still life, and the portrait of her great-grandmother. The foggy cliffs depicted on the one closest to her seem to blink in and out of focus, and the fog shifts in time with her breaths._

_As she turns to walk up to the door at the far end of the corridor, towards the guards and her own rooms, the fog follows her for a few steps, curling around her ankles before withdrawing back onto the canvas reluctantly. The guards don’t seem to notice: They’re staring straight ahead, the blue and red of their uniforms starkly vibrant under the too-bright light streaming from the chandeliers overhead._

_Her feet don’t quite drag, but she finds that walking down the stretch of the corridor takes longer than usual – for some reason, she doesn’t really want to reach the door and what lies behind it. Not that it makes any sense, but the closer she gets, the more she wants to turn around and leave. Or flee. Either of the two._

_When she has come close enough, the guards reach out simultaneously and grab one handle each. They stand like that for a moment without moving a muscle. Only when she steps back in confusion, they open the door for her and her half-formed plan to just leave vanishes into thin air._

_Obediently, she steps through the door, and doesn’t even jump when it falls closed immediately, producing a sharp crack that does not quite echo._

_The room is empty._

_White walls turn into an equally white ceiling, the stone tiles are colder still than those in the corridor and the fog seems to have seeped in from under the door: The air in the room is clouded by thin, greyish-white wisps that feel like dry, cool fingers dragging over her skin as they lazily drift by._

_The sound of her bare feet against the tiles seems louder in here than it was outside._

_She circles through her rooms. All of them are empty, devoid of furniture and what little decoration there was. The carpet in the bedroom and the sitting room feels rough and rustles quietly beneath her feet, like dry grass or drier leaves. The fog is thickest in the antechamber though, and as she opens the door to her study, she finds the air clear and warm. The wooden floor almost burns with heat in contrast to the frosty tiles or the dried-out carpet._

_Eolan is sitting at her desk, head bent over a book of some sorts. His nose must almost touch the paper, and his long blonde hair obscures his face. Lucan sits on the desk, his back to her, eyes apparently focused on the family picture that Mother insisted on hanging behind her desk._

_The whole family – including herself – is watching impassively as she makes her way over to the desk. Neither of her brothers move until she stops in front of them._

_Eolan is the first to give a reaction. He slowly lifts his head (strands of hair slipping from his face), but instead of his eyes, two black discs meet her gaze: A white mask without nose or mouth obscures his face, and the black discs stare unblinkly back at her while Lucan slowly turns his upper body to face her. His mask is black, and the discs are white._

_“Aenor.”_

_The voice is neither Lucan’s nor Eolan’s, but both of their masks… not quite move at the sound, but something almost-moves in the area where their mouths should be._

_“Big sister Aenor.”_

_The masks seem to crack open ever so slightly with each word, only to go back to their almost unnervingly smooth surface as soon as the sounds have been uttered, although the cracks seem to become larger with every word._

_“Our one and only protector, always ready to come to her family’s defence.”_

_By now, the cracks gleam either white or black against the surface of the masks. She has the strange feeling that she actually looks into something – something that lies where her brothers’ faces should be; something that is either very dark or very bright. Are those teeth?_

_“So why weren’t you there?”_

_No, not teeth. Needles, maybe?_

_“We needed you.”_

_No, not needles either. Now that she is getting a better and better look at them, they’re jagged and chipped, like – like…_

_“Why didn’t you listen?”_

_…like slivers of something broken. The thought feels as if it should make her shudder._

_“We begged you to listen to father. We begged you to listen to mother. You didn’t.”_

_The cracks have sprung over the entire with of the masks by now, and they don’t quite close up anymore. There is a permanent gap approximately where the mouths would be, and the slivers seem to have increased in both number and size._

_“But you - you knew better, didn’t you?”_

_Eolan slowly closes the book. Lucan turns away again._

_“Look where it got you.”_

 

\- IV -

 

When the dreams have been particularly vivid, she sometimes sees them out of the corner of her eye: Someone walks by with hair as bright as Eo’s and for a second she could swear it’s her youngest brother turning that corner, or one of her officers has his head bent over a book or dataslate – the curve of his shoulders making her momentarily forget that it’s not actually Luc puzzling over one of his assignments – and she almost reaches out to ruffle his hair.

 

She usually downs enough recaf to wake up a small battalion after that, just to make sure, or (if evening is approaching anyway) the better part of a bottle of spirits.

 

Just to make sure.

 

 

\- V -

 

_It’s pouring out from under Eolan’s door._

_The white tiles in front of the door are crusted with the stark red on the drying edges of the slowly expanding pool, and light glints wetly off the sluggish liquid within. Only where the grooves run along the stone tiles the fluid seems to flow quicker – it dries on the tiles, but spreads steadily across the corridor in a criss-crossing pattern of red lines against white._

_As the pool keeps expanding (having to struggle against and over the drying edges, pushing against itself like a river against a damn) it starts to slowly fill the air with a coppery tang that she not so much smells but rather tastes on the back of her tongue. Her feet have long since grown cold – the stone beneath her drinks warmth like the air of a clear winter morning on Karia – and she barely feels her legs anymore anyway._

_Her breath, her heartbeat are the only sounds in the corridor._

_It seems to avoid her. The red lines running along the grooves stop a few tiles away from her and as the pool stretches its surface towards her, it starts curving inward around her feet – gently at first, but more noticeable after a few hours, or minutes, or days._

_The ceiling is lost in the darkness above her, but light is nevertheless falling down on her bare feet and the red lines that come criss-crossing in from both ends of the corridor. To her left, where the corridor leads up to Luc’s rooms, the gently flowing liquid is quicker and less prone to drying, but darker still – almost too red, too saturated. To her right, where bright, swift lines come snaking along the grooves from the direction of her parents’ rooms, the air seems warmer, lighter, but the coppery tang is stronger and she is here anyway, rooted to the floor, unable to wrench her gaze from the floor and the red._

_Emperor only knows how long she has been standing here. Not that it’s particularly important in any case – the only thing left is the blood on the floor._

 

 

\- VI -

 

Sometimes she wakes up and still feels hands on her skin, still feels lips dragging over her collarbone or teeth gently scraping over her shoulder.

 

She almost expects to roll over and collide with a well-muscled leg or arm, or a torso still warm with sleep or warmer yet with something else – and that is usually the point where she yanks the blanket off and proceeds to almost scrub her skin off in the shower. It’s ridiculous, completely irrational and probably speaks volumes about how deeply she let Rhiann get under her skin, this lingering feeling of disgust and… not quite violation, but it comes close enough.

 

(Of course she has to dream of Rhiann. Dreaming of Ivica would be pleasant, and that is apparently not the way her brain has decided to go about things.)

 

(Damn.)

 

\- VII -

 

Not that the nightmares – or the remnants thereof – are a nightly occurrence.

 

They’re also not quite as regular as clockwork, although she has gotten better at predicting them.

 

Warp travel usually means that she is not going to sleep more than four hours each night, no matter how she tries, and however little sleep she might get is not going to be restful either. She is moderately proud of the fact that – so far, at least – she has gotten by with recaf. There are other ways to keep oneself very wide awake indeed, but they tend to be harder on one’s metabolism and law enforcement tends to frown on both possession and manufacturing of these substances. And as long as she’s honest: As long as the nightmares stay where they belong and don’t start to invade her waking hours (which has already happened, of course, everything else would be too easy), she’s at least more or less happy.

 

Conflicts among the crew are also never a good sign. Neither are more than eight hours of administrative work per day, which makes for some fairly impressive juggling of schedules and tasks on her part, or a lack of physical exercise for more than three days. As it turns out, a change of scenery helps, but these are few and far between.

 

Lack of sleep is either a blessing or a curse, apparently depending on the collective mood of about five thousand Imperial Saints she’s never even heard about, and foregoing regular meals has yet to help with anything, so she has mostly stopped doing that by now.

 

She strongly suspects that talking about her dreams might help in the long term – that much is just common sense, really – but that one is out of the question for now for… reasons. Lots of reasons. Of varying quality. Really, she prefers not to think about the whole mess if she can help it (which she usually can’t), but the reasons are there and that has to be enough for now.

 

(At least two people aboard would probably try to verbally dissect her if she ever said that out loud. Three additional people would be slightly more polite about it, but still tear her to pieces. Four if she counts Tek as people, which she probably shouldn’t, so she’s down to three people and an abomination.)

 

No, as long as blessed Materium surrounds them, the nightmares usually – usually – only make an appearance every three or four nights. Two, if she’s particularly unlucky. Or a few nights in a row, if she’s really particularly unlucky.

 

Still, entirely manageable.

 

Well.

 

_Mostly._

**Author's Note:**

> posted for the 40k OC week on tumblr


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